Many of today's handheld devices make use of wireless “connections” for telephony, digital data transfer, geographical positioning, and the like. Despite differences in frequency spectra, modulation methods, and spectral power densities, the wireless connectivity standards use synchronized data packets to transmit and receive data. In general, all of these wireless-connectivity capabilities (e.g. WiFi, WiMAX, Bluetooth, etc.) are defined by industry-approved standards (e.g. IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16) which specify the parameters and limits to which devices having those connectivity capabilities must adhere.
At any point along the device-development continuum, it may be necessary to test and verify that a device is operating within its standards' specifications. Most such devices are transceivers, that is, they transmit and receive wireless RF signals. Specialized systems designed for testing such devices typically contain subsystems designed to receive and analyze device-transmitted signals, and to send signals that subscribe to industry-approved standards so as to determine whether a device is receiving and processing the wireless signals in accordance with its standard.
A common test in wireless devices is determining the data packet error rate (PER) at various power levels to ensure that a device meets or exceeds the PER specifications over the specified range of power levels. The test requires a means for sending data packets to the device under test (DUT), detecting when a data packet has been received with no errors, and keeping track of the proportion of error-free data packets to total number of data packets sent. Some wireless protocols provide a reasonably efficient acknowledgement process that can be used to count and keep track of error-free data packets received. Other protocols, like Bluetooth LE, would require additional time slots for sending such acknowledgement (ACK) confirmations, i.e., data packets, which would essentially result, in some cases, in doubling the testing time. A common challenge presented by conventional testing strategies employs sequences which fail to contribute direct test value.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved adaptive functionality to eliminate the reliance on data packet-by-data packet ACK accounting for calculating PER. A further need exists to reduce the time and cost of performing PER analysis and testing in any case that involves sending and receiving a predetermined number of error-free data packets.